Chrissie Van Mierlo ends her book with an apt description of the current scholarly debate around the relationship between James Joyce and Catholicism: “something of a battleground” (141). Free thought, nostalgia, misbelief, heresy: these are only a few of the growing catalogue of terms scholars have used to characterize the ambiguous relationship between the Irish writer and the faith he clearly abandoned as a young man. While these debates have mostly been fought about Joyce's earlier works, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, Van Mierlo shows how the most challenging and last of his writings, Finnegans Wake, resists dogmatic and orthodox ways of thinking as a matter of its theme and design. Wake, she further argues, directly and consistently engages in a critique of the Catholic Church's conservative politics and theology in the Ireland of Joyce's time.

Van Mierlo finds that this approach to Catholicism can best be described as apostasy, which she defines as Joyce's intentional abandonment of the Catholic Church and his subsequent war upon it, as he himself put it in an early letter to his future wife, Nora. If Joyce's attitudes toward the church might have been thought to have softened as he aged, Van Mierlo convincingly demonstrates instead that Wake engages in sustained and often biting criticism of church hypocrisy and authoritarianism. Particular targets for Joyce included the hierarchy, especially those most conservative members of it, who were in no short supply in Ireland, thanks to Cardinal Cullen's devotional revolution, or in Rome, with its emphasis on authority throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Van Mierlo develops her argument by using an impressive depth of research in the history, politics, and theology that shaped Joyce's sense of Ireland and Europe to open up new readings of Wake. Her introduction provides an historical overview of the Catholic Church in both Rome and Ireland, which sets up a chapter on Joyce and Catholicism more broadly, before four chapters that focus on specific sections of Wake itself. These focused readings are wonderful contributions to studies of Wake as well as Joyce's later relationship to Catholicism, and they significantly advance our understanding of both. In the best of these chapters, “Dogmatism and Deviance in the Watches of Shaun,” Van Mierlo convincingly shows how the text of Wake draws equally on the style and substance of the writings of well-known Catholic figures Father Bernard Vaughan and Cardinal Cullen to produce a characteristically Joycean mix of ribald humor and sharp critique. One cannot help but applaud Joyce's lampooning of such figures when we see them condemning, as Cullen did, the waltz and the polka. In this and other chapters, Van Mierlo moves from readings of Wake to range across other texts in Joyce's corpus with ease and grace, often breaking new ground on the relationship of these more well-worn works with Catholicism. The result is a much richer understanding of how Joyce's critical view of the hierarchy and elite of the church endured throughout his writings.

In keeping with Van Mierlo's apt metaphor, the battlefield of Joyce and Catholicism has sometimes led to a lack of nuance on both sides, so that Joyce becomes either an atheist materialist or some kind of crypto-Catholic (he was, from all the evidence, neither of these). Van Mierlo seems to tend toward the more materialist understandings of Joyce, and her assessments in her chapter on Joyce and Catholicism can be shaped a little by this attitude. She adopts an overly critical approach to scholars who have argued that Joyce had a more positive view of Catholicism, and largely uncritically accepts Geert Lernout's recent contention that Joyce was a thoroughgoing unbeliever. But these are minor issues in a remarkable work. Moreover, as her afterword suggests, Van Mierlo understands the nuance and complexity of the question that Joyce, Catholicism, and religious belief raises. Her study is one that makes an enormous contribution to the relationship between these first two terms, even as it rightly leaves open and unsolved the larger, and perhaps unsolvable, questions about Joyce and religious belief.